Coming Out of the Dark Ages, Psychedelic Science, and Freedom Over Consciousness: Introduction to the Benefits of Cannabis, Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, LSD, DMT, and Ibogaine

“None of Dr. Leary's most important studies have either suffered refutation or enjoyed confirmation, because enacted law, statues enacted after and because of Dr. Leary's research - makes it a crime for any other psychologists or psychiatrists to replicate such research. I know you've heard that the Inquisition ended in 1819, but in many areas of psychotherapy and medicine, the U.S. government has taken up where the Vatican left off.” - Robert Anton Wilson

I. UN’s Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs

In 1961, on behest of the United States of America, the United Nations passed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs(full text), an international treaty signed, at the time, by 73 nations - 184 at present - to “prohibit production and supply of specific (nominally narcotic) drugs and of drugs with similar effects except under licence for specific purposes.” As of March 2005, 116 drugs (full list - pdf) were controlled under this Convention:

“Earlier treaties had only controlled opium, coca, and derivatives such as morphine, heroin and cocaine. The Single Convention, adopted in 1961, consolidated those treaties and broadened their scope to include cannabis and drugs whose effects are similar to those of the drugs specified….

“The Single Convention has been extremely influential in standardizing national drug control laws. In particular, the United States' Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and the United Kingdom's Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 were designed to fulfill treaty obligations.”

Even though the Preamble of the Single Convention affirmed the importance of the medical use of these controlled substances, stating that “narcotic drugs continue to be indispensable for the relief of pain and suffering”, very few scientists or medical practitioners have been given authorization to conduct research into the beneficial properties of these drugs. This has resulted in decades of lost opportunity to study these substances, causing a tremendous amount of anguish for those who suffer the most in our societies.

“An anonymous questionnaire sent to all patients attending the Prague Movement Disorder Centre revealed that 25% of 339 respondents had taken cannabis and 45.9% of these described some form of benefit….

“We realized that after this public information, some of our patients spontaneously started to take cannabis to alleviate their PD symptoms. The aim of this study therefore is to evaluate their possible experience with cannabis….

“Due to the illegal status of cannabis in the Czech Republic, it was impossible to run a proper clinical trial and we had to use an anonymous retrospective questionnaire-based study; we are well aware of its limitations. Questionnaires are used quite commonly in clinical research because they enable obtaining data from a large group of patients; however, results from this type of study cannot be conclusive and should rather serve as a baseline for future research.”

Many across the globe are discovering the benefits of cannabis and other psychoactive drugs; in large part due to the compassion they feel for their loved ones forcing them to seek both cure and relief outside of the conventional medical community. This has proven to be a very wise choice since many that have incorporated these substances and plants into their lives have indicated that their quality of life has drastically improved:

“Giffiths’ study involved 18 healthy adults, average age 46, who participated in five eight-hour drug sessions with either psilocybin — at varying doses — or placebo. Nearly all the volunteers were college graduates and 78% participated regularly in religious activities; all were interested in spiritual experience.

“Fourteen months after participating in the study, 94% of those who received the drug said the experiment was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives; 39% said it was the single most meaningful experience.”

“What if we actually got that human beings are bio-psycho-social creatures by nature, and actually bio-psycho-spiritual creatures by nature—which is to say that our biology is inseparable from our psychological emotional and spiritual existence—and therefore what manifests in the body is not some isolated and unique event or misfortune, but a manifestation of what my life has been in interaction with my psychological and social and spiritual environment?

“Well, if we had that kind of understanding then we would approach illness and health in a completely different fashion.

“What if, furthermore, we understood something in the West which has been the underlying core insight of Eastern spiritual pathways and aboriginal shamanic pathways around the world, which is that human beings are not their personalities, we’re not our thoughts, we’re not our emotions, we are not our dysfunctional or functional dynamics, but that at the core there is a true self that is somehow connected to—in fact not connected to but part of—nature and creation.

“An illness from that perspective represents a loss of that connection, a loss of that unity, a loss of that belonging to a much larger entity. And therefore, to treat the illness or the symptom as the problem is actually to ignore the real possibility that the symptom and the illness are themselves symptoms, rather than the fundamental problems.”

“It’s in that perspective then, that I’ve come to understand, quite before my acquaintance with ayahuasca, but that's how I’ve come to understand human illness and dysfunction. Which is to say that illness and dysfunction represent the products or the consequences of a lifelong interaction with our environment, particularly our psychological and social environment, and that they represent a deep disconnection from our true selves.”

Dr. Gabor Maté: Ayahuasca and Addiction Treatment

“In the late 1960s, human experiments with psychedelic drugs were brought to a halt. Government reacted to the anarchy of the hippy counter-culture. The drug-crazed Charles Manson slayings came to symbolise public fear of the street use of LSD. Funding ceased, and the few researchers who battled on were ostracised. But lost in the blanket ban were remarkable research projects in the field of psychiatry that held out new hope for the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism. Bill Eagles' extraordinary film tells the story of a handful of dedicated scientists who have struggled to make psychedelic research respectable again.”

BBC Horizon: Psychedelic Science - (DMT, LSD, Ibogaine)

IV. The Five Stages of Destruction

Fear of persecution has resulted in tens of millions of people suffering needlessly to appease those that rule us in their attempts to maintain control and to prolong a war on drugs that they profit from. This is why Robert Anton Wilson stated that “Voltaire announced the Age of Reason two centuries too soon. We are still in the Dark Ages.”

At approximately 1:27:00 into the following amazing documentary, “The House I Live In”, reflecting on the work of Raul Hilberg, Richard Lawrence Miller provides a summary of the step-by-step process of destruction as it relates to the war on drugs (relevant video segment follows the full documentary):

1. Identification – a group of people is identified as the cause of the problems in that society. People begin to perceive their fellow citizens as bad or evil. Their lives become worthless.

2. Ostracism - we learn how to hate these people, how to take their jobs away, how to make it harder for them to survive. People lose their place to live and are often forced into ghettos where they are physically isolated, separated from the rest of society.

3. Confiscation - people lose their rights, they lose civil liberties. The laws change so that it becomes easier for people to be searched and for their property to be confiscated, and once you start taking people’s property away, it makes it easier to start taking people away.

4. Concentration - the State begins to concentrate undesirables into facilities such as prisons and camps. People lose their rights. People can’t vote any more. They can’t have children any more. Often their labor is exploited in a systematic form.

5. Annihilation - this might be indirect, by withholding medical care, by withholding food, or by preventing further births. Or it may be direct, where death is inflicted, where people are deliberately killed.

As our centralized corporate governments try to enforce archaic agendas by desperately waging war on science, we should keep in mind that there are countless benefits associated with prohibited substances. By developing a symbiotic relationship with psychedelics, illicit drugs if you wish, we have benefited for much of human history, and this fact is well known in the scientific community. Some of the greatest thinkers of our time have been bold enough to point out the obvious, that the war on drugs is a war on consciousness:

“I stand here invoking the hard-won right of freedom of speech to call for and demand another right to be recognised and that is the right of adult sovereignty over consciousness. There’s a war on consciousness in our society, and if we as adults are not allowed to make sovereign decisions about what to experience with our own consciousness while doing no harm to others, including the decision to use responsibly ancient and sacred visionary plants, then we cannot claim to be free in any way and it’s useless for our society to go around the world imposing our form of democracy on others while we nourish this rot at the heart of society and we do not allow individual freedom over consciousness.” - Graham Hancock, 12 January 2013, TEDx conference in Whitechapel, London

Below you will find the names and websites of some of the more prominent groups spearheading the battle to end prohibition in the United States and Canada. They are trying to bring sanity back into our lives and I’m sure they would appreciate our support as much as we appreciate their efforts.